This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, please click here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now. » August 30, 1998 THEATER THEATER; The New Musical: Will Corporate Money Call The Tune? By BARRY SINGER Last August in these pages, Barry Singer, who writes about popular music, reported on a disparate group of young musicians and lyricists fascinated by and committed to the American musical. In that article, entitled ''True Believers in the Future of the Musical,'' Mr. Singer found that a new generation was struggling to redefine and create its own traditions. In this article he describes some of the fruit of that labor. IN the world of musical theater, change is a matter of opinion. Music styles, producing practices, staging conventions persist in loving stasis for generations, interrupted by spasms of change that can be very inconvenient. Denial is always an option. Take ''Rent,'' for example. Clearly ''Rent'' changed something about musical theater, if only the limits of forbidden subject matter. Yet contrarians in musical theater will tell you that ''Rent'' -- a story involving drugs, AIDS and young people in the East Village -- is really ''Hair'' retrofitted for the 90's. Nothing new. Andrew Lloyd Webber's impact in the 80's? Just recycled Rodgers and Hammerstein with a boost of spectacle. No real change there. The jolt of Disney's smash ''Lion King,'' however, has been hard to dispute. Not only did a majority of critics like it, but ticket buyers in record-breaking numbers are demonstrating to commercial producers that there is a vast new potential audience for musical theater. Whether its members will prove to be a committed constituency remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the moment seems auspicious to examine whether anything has changed in the world of the American musical. And who better to ask than the younger generation creating new works? For the composers Adam Guettel, 33, and Michael John LaChiusa, 36, this has been a pretty good year, if a bit disorienting as a result. Neither has yet to feel entirely secure with things going his way. Twelve months ago, Mr. LaChiusa had at least four projects in the works and no confirmed productions. Today, he is an artist in residence at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, collaborating with George C. Wolfe, the theater's producer and director, on a new musical version of ''The Wild Party,'' Joseph M. March's verse paean to Roaring Twenties hedonism, scheduled to begin performances in February. Mr. LaChiusa has also been named a composer in residence at the Chicago Lyric Opera, and Dodger Endemol, the Broadway producing organization, has tapped him for a musicalization of ''Zorro.'' (''It's not your usual sing-along,'' Mr. LaChiusa insists.) Perhaps most notably, Lincoln Center Theater has committed to mounting, before the next millennium, Mr. LaChiusa's magnum, near-operatic opus, ''Marie Christine,'' which he has written for the singer and actress Audra McDonald. ''Yes, I've found art and commerce recently,'' Mr. LaChiusa grudgingly admits. ''I'm putting my head on the block.'' And the effect of ''The Lion King''? ''While I admire Julie Taymor's work very much as a director and a designer,'' he says, '' 'Lion King' is the marriage of art and commerce. But so is Dolly the sheep. And what will that finally lead to?'' By contrast, Mr. Guettel remains almost chronically circumspect. True, his long-labored-over song cycle, ''Saturn Returns,'' was finally produced (in April at the Public Theater), to critical acclaim. And his 1996 musical, ''Floyd Collins,'' has been resurrected for a national tour expected to culminate at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival next year. Mr. Guettel is even working on a new musical, about which he will say nothing beyond: ''I'm into it a lot. It's coming out really fast, for me.'' Still, his response to any success is characteristically tortured. ''It's like a nerve ending that's inflamed,'' he says unhappily. ''You feel both invincible and incredibly insecure.'' As for Disney's ''Lion King''? ''In Julie Taymor, Disney took a chance on a fringe person who delivered,'' Mr. Guettel says, referring to the musical's director, who began in nonprofit theater. ''That can only help people like me who are perceived to be creatively fringe, too.'' Among others of this younger generation writing musicals today, opinions about Disney on Broadway remain pragmatic. The composer Randy Courts, 43, and his lyricist and book writer, Mark St. Germain, 42 -- both veterans of the nonprofit theater -- have noted the commercial success of ''The Lion King'' while working on ''The Gingerbread House,'' their pop take on Hansel and Gretel, commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, the Off Broadway theater that helped develop ''Floyd Collins.'' ''Corporations are starting to see that there are different ways to make a lot of money with musicals,'' Mr. Courts says hopefully. ''Which means, for the first time, there is actually a chance I might be able to make a living at this.'' On the other hand, Jeanine Tesori, who won an Obie Award for her Off Broadway musical ''Violet'' last season (also developed at Playwrights Horizons), has now decided to branch out. ''I'm just diversifying,'' she insists.'' In the last year, Ms. Tesori, 36, has composed an eclectic score of incidental music (recently released on Resmiranda Records) for ''Twelfth Night'' at Lincoln Center and given birth to a baby. She has embarked on a music-theater piece commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. And she has signed on to help adapt the film ''Thoroughly Modern Millie'' for Broadway, to be produced by Whoopi Goldberg and Fox Theatricals. ''More commercial than that you cannot get,'' Ms. Tesori acknowledges. ''In some ways, it's scarier because the money is huge and the margin for making mistakes is really small. There's no room for error with budgets like that.'' While Disney continues to hedge those odds by engaging pre-sold pop stars like Elton John and high- profile animated-movie-score creators like Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz to write their musicals, a few new, previously unsung composing talents will join Mr. LaChiusa and Mr. Guettel, Mr. Courts and Ms. Tesori this season with their first significant New York productions. At 28, the composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown finds himself in somewhat rarefied circumstances, preparing his first major musical, ''Parade,'' in collaboration with a Pulitzer Prize- winning playwright, Alfred Uhry, and a Tony Award-winning legend, the director Harold Prince. The co-production, which begins performances in November at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, unites the biggest nonprofit institutional theater in the country, Lincoln Center Theater, with the Canadian-based commercial theatrical organization Livent. (The decision by both groups to join forces was made before the current investigation into Livent's accounting practices and the suspension of its impresario-founder and chief creative director, Garth H. Drabinsky. Andre Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, said he had been assured by Livent that ''Parade'' would proceed on schedule.) Mr. Brown, who was born in Ossining, N.Y., and grew up in Rockland County, attributes his seemingly meteoric rise in part to Mr. Prince's daughter, Daisy. Ms. Prince first heard him play in a piano bar, conceived and directed a revue of his work, ''Songs for a New World'' at the WPA Theater in 1995, and wound up introducing him to her father. When Stephen Sondheim decided against composing the music for ''Parade,'' Mr. Prince offered Mr. Brown the job. ''I called Daisy,'' Mr. Brown recalls, ''and I said, 'Daisy, your dad just asked me to write his next musical.' And Daisy said, 'I know, isn't that great?' And I said, 'No, I'm petrified.' '' The subject matter of ''Parade'' is far from that of a typical commercial musical: the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager falsely accused of murder in the Deep South near the turn of the century. For Though Mr. Brown's music tilts strongly toward the accessible, this is not a problem. ''I'm trying to express something very individual and specific,'' he says. ''Disney has a very different aim,'' Unlike Mr. Brown, Patrick Cook, 48, and Frederick Freyer, 37, have paid years of nonprofit dues. Alumni of the musical-theater educator Lehman Engel's influential workshops at BMI, the two are grounded in the tradition's craft and lore. Unlike Mr. LaChiusa and Mr. Guettel, though, whose sense of that tradition edges toward the irreverent, Mr. Cook and Mr. Freyer write melodiously earnest music that is anything but revolutionary. In January, their ''Captains Courageous,'' based on the novel by Rudyard Kipling, will bow at the Manhattan Theater Club. Born at a BMI workshop in 1988, the show has been developed through a circuitous route involving versions at the National Music Theater Conference in 1990, the Ford Theater in Washington in 1992, the Goodspeed Opera House-at-Chester in Connecticut in 1994, and finally in a series of Manhattan Theater Club readings and workshops during 1996 and 1997. The course navigated by ''Captains Courageous'' is an object lesson -- some would say painful, others merely successful -- in contemporary musical-theater's protracted incubational tendencies. ''The process served us enormously well,'' Mr. Cook says. ''We had time to work and think without an enormous amount of pressure.'' And as for Disney and Broadway today? ''I think it's great,'' he replies, ''that after so many years of nobody paying attention, the big boys are fighting over Broadway.'' Mr.